


Hold On Hope

by Merkwerkee



Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [38]
Category: Masters of the Metaverse
Genre: Insects, like really big insects too, planet metaverse: invasion, s6 e7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22856296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: A long walk brings with it time for introspection; a big fight brings with it regrets about using your best weapon to explodify a mountain
Relationships: Bruno Hamilton&Andi Jaymes
Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [38]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643020





	Hold On Hope

Bruno walked carefully down the narrow passageway, keeping a sharp eye on the torch-lit figures ahead of him.

Andi had been first to duck into the short doorway that marked the entrance to these passages, but by the time Bruno had finished rewiring the plasma pistol to bring the mountainside down on the library entrance and ducked in himself Dr. Clarkson - or, more likely, Queen Shandroth - had taken the lead. Bruno himself had fallen into the rearguard position; while his avatar had some knowledge of these caves, if any of the howling horde behind them managed to slip past the Brotherhood’s defenses he wanted to be absolutely certain he was the first thing they met. Not to mention that while Brother Tyber wasn’t nearly as large as Bruno himself was, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he’d be able to slide past everyone else in the narrow confines they currently found themselves in.

Bringing up the rear in a confined environment wasn’t exactly one of Bruno’s favorite pastimes, but neither was it one he was unfamiliar with. As they followed the narrow, winding path through the mountain’s interior, he could feel old instincts humming to life in the back of his mind. Faint echoes were categorized and dismissed, smells analyzed and filed away, and eyes ticked constantly up, left, right, down again; while ambush from above was unlikely, he’d had it happen once in Afghanistan when some insurgents had holed up in a cave system with valuable intel and the squad Bruno’d been attached to had been ordered to clear the place out.

He’d gone in with twenty other guys and walked out with six.

The concentration required to keep a lookout was minimal but constant, allowing him to put aside things like the fact that his avatar hadn’t eaten for the better part of a day or the weariness that dragged at the corners of his eyes. Staying alive was a higher priority at the moment than bodily discomfort, but some things were less easy to put aside. Constantly keeping an eye out allowed him to covertly observe Andi in her avatar as she stayed further away from him than he would like.

He’d been relieved, mostly, when she’d stepped unharmed out of Pierce’s ship; the invaders didn’t exactly make him more sanguine with the prospect of her being back, but something in his chest had eased when she was back in arm’s reach. Of course, she’d had to jump into a pod almost immediately to assist Crash and the others but Bruno’d been assured by Wells that even if her avatar died in the course of the mission Andi would be able to return to her body unscathed physically. Mentally was another story, one Bruno was becoming more concerned about the longer they were on a mission together though her avatar had reportedly survived expelling Zenda’s people from the metaverse filled with dinosaurs they had apparently been using as part of their supply chain.

Bruno was observant, and while he’d only known his granddaughter for a relatively short while before that fateful day in Nevada, she’d been a different young woman. Happier, in a way he didn’t quite have words for; she’d withdrawn into herself during their stay in prison (something he still wanted to have a personal word with Jaxun about) and then in Arena Zenda had kept them too busy to interact much beyond mission parameters. But now…When Bruno looked into the eyes of her avatar and through them to Andi herself, there was something in the back of them that reminded him of Weber. Corporal Frederic Weber, one of Bruno’s longest-lasting squadmates, had never been quite the same after a mission had resulted in half their squad getting captured and tortured by the enemy.

Weber had functioned well enough afterwards, carried out his missions in a satisfactory manner, but Bruno had seen the same kind of soul-deep injury lurking in Weber’s gaze whenever he’d had had a drink too many. In the end, Bruno suspected that was what really had killed the man, never mind what the official report said about bravery under fire. He’d spent almost a decade bleeding from somewhere that didn’t leave a mark, and eventually he’d bled out despite Bruno’s best efforts. The thought of Andi running out into enemy fire to save an injured comrade because she didn’t care whether she lived or died scared Bruno on a level he hadn’t suspected was possible. 

So he did the best he could, using both his skills and his avatar’s natural abilities to the fullest extent possible. He endured Andi’s needling with as much grace as he could muster, and did what he could to keep the mission on track. When they’d investigated the burned-out monastery, he’d gone in in place of Andi for fear of how the inhabitants would react to her avatar; when she wanted to teleport up to the mountain fortress, he’d taken advantage of his avatar’s status to volunteer at once. When she objected to the Brothers burning the library they had worked for so many centuries to secure, he’d sacrificed the only weapon he had that was at all effective against the 742 invaders without a second thought.

Bruno could only pray to whatever forces were out there that it would be enough to staunch the bleeding.

An almost subliminal noise brought Bruno sharply back to the present. A high-pitched click, at the very edge of his hearing - he suspected that if he hadn’t had the benefit of advanced healing to repair what age had stolen from him, he wouldn’t have heard it at all - was sounding from somewhere, and getting rapidly louder. If he had to make a comparison, the closest thing he’d heard was one particularly harrowing mission where the submersible they’d been using for ex-filtration had gotten lashed by active sonar. The narrow passage they had been following opened out dramatically, and the clicks echoed off the walls.

“Bats?” Andi’s confused voice nearly made Bruno flinch - if they were being lashed, the last thing they wanted to do was make more noise.

“Centimoths.” The name floated up from Brother Tyber’s memory with alarmed alacrity, attached to gruesome stories the older novices had used to tell initiates about these very tunnels. Enormous bugs with a taste for anything that moved, a deeply venomous bite, and a paralytic toxin in the scales of their wings that could stop a man’s heart if he breathed in too much of it. When the initiates had gathered enough courage to ask the Head of Novitiates about it, the old man had confirmed the stories and added stern warnings to never venture down the tunnels unless instructed to do so by an older monk.

Both Andi and Robbins looked deeply alarmed by the prospect.

“Do we put the torches out?” Andi’s voice wavered with uncertainty, glancing up at the ceiling high above them that was almost certainly covered in the things given the way the flickering light from the aforementioned torches wavered against it.

“No point. They don’t need light, but we sure as hell do.” Robbins’ tactically sound advice was delivered in an almost cynical drawl as he moved a bit further out into the cave, stepping around the bones that littered the cavern floor. Bruno had one second to mourn the loss of the plasma pistol before something huge and distinctly insectoid nearly removed the head of Robbins’ avatar.

Robbins dropped into a combat roll with the same grace he’d displayed in the ring back on Arena, grabbing a discarded shield from the floor as he did so. Queen Shandroth - and it was clearly the warrior-queen, not Dr. Clarkson - reacted quickly yet unhurriedly, fixing her torch on a convenient rock before reaching for her bow and arrows. Bruno pulled out his own bow and arrows, for all the good they’d do, and nocked an arrow on the off-chance he could get a clear shot.

Andi disappeared.

Bruno’s heart leaped into his throat even as his eyes darted around as much of the cavern space as he could see - which truthfully wasn’t much. Even Queen Shandroth’s somewhat-elevated torch only cast so much light, and it wasn’t nearly enough to light the cavern in any significant fashion. Not that additional illumination seemed to be the purpose behind the Queen’s actions; even as he watched, she aimed an arrow carefully through the flames toward the as-yet unlit ceiling and loosed. The arrow caught as it passed through the flames, and as it arced higher it revealed more and more of the ceiling of the cavern - a ceiling alive with dozens, if not scores, of centimoths.

Bruno’s mouth went dry even as he slung his bow. If the overlapping carapaces weren’t thick as tank armor, he’d eat his avatar’s cloak; a bow wasn’t going to do enough damage, not with ammunition he had, and if even one of them started dropping the toxic scales of its wings the mission would end here. He hadn’t seen Andi in the brief illumination offered by the arrow, but the Queen was already firing another. And another. And another. Each one lit of the ceiling a bit more, but otherwise seemed not to inconvenience the centimoths in the slightest. Robbins was kneeling on the ground, sheltering underneath the shield he’d picked up, and while Bruno couldn’t hear the words he was mouthing he’d seen him do it before on Arena during his televised matches.

Still, Bruno had his doubts as to whether one punch - even one strong enough liquefy an unarmored person - would be enough to deal with all the centimoths on the ceiling. There had to be _something_ he could do, something that would take care of every centimoth once and for all. He reached back into himself, shuffling through the various abilities imparted to him by association with previous avatars - _you people with the super powers_ , that’s what Leibowitz-O'Kelley had said, and while the comparison grated at something Bruno didn’t care to consider in depth, the Irishman hadn’t exactly been _wrong_.

A memory reared its ugly head, halting Bruno in his search. The greasy, tainted reminder of a man who’d fought a war long enough to forget what it was he was fighting for. A man whose love of violence was only partially met by his lust for a good tumble, who would fuck a woman senseless and then slit her throat for wearing the wrong uniform. A man whose only reaction to destroying an entire planet and every last living soul on it had been a fierce exultation in the power granted to him by the functions of a capital ship.

A man who, but for a few, crucial decisions in his life, might have been Bruno Hamilton.

Lothar Kaldegga.

Bruno disliked strongly to think about it, but Kaldegga had left more than an impression. Power pulsed through Bruno, cycling in time to the throb of the planet’s molten core far, far below him, and he felt an answering hum in the rocks all around him. The memory of Kaldegga was seared into Bruno’s brain, much as he desperately wished to forget him; using Kaldegga’s power without the channeling devices that had been locked around the wrists of every magic user in that metaverse would have…consequences. Bruno glanced at the ceiling and grimaced - if he died trying this, the mission could continue, but if everyone died then the mission would fail. It wasn’t much of a choice, really, and Bruno pulled on the power in his soul. The thrumming in his core grew more resonant, and he could see the pebbles around him start to shiver.

He was about to call to the others, warn them, when the loudest noise Bruno had ever heard in his life reverberated through the chamber. It threw the rhythm in his chest off for just a brief moment and the world went the kind of silent around him that spelled temporary deafness rather than an actual lack of noise. He looked up to see the shield Robbins had been sheltering under fall noiselessly to the ground, the Queen dropping the arrow she’d been about to fire, and -

 _“Andi!”_ Bruno roared as his granddaughter danced among the behemoth forms far above them. At least, he felt himself make the noise in his throat but not a sound of it came to his ears. The silence was profound. Still, like the rising plume of magma that signaled the eruption of a volcano, he could no more stop the swell of power in his chest than he could stop the tide. “Everyone take cover!” he shouted as loudly as he could into the silence, though the heedless motion of the others told him they were as deaf as he was.

Bruno gritted his teeth and slammed his hands into the wall.

The effect was instantaneous; the walls and ceiling of the cavern began to shake as the power moved through his chest and down his arms like the slow, unhurried progress of a lava flow. Pieces of the ceiling began to fall, small at first and then much, much bigger. A voice echoed in his memory - Cavendish, an ex-SAS explosives expert he’d worked with briefly after ‘Nam - _“Bring the whole bloody ceiling down, it will!”_ He could _feel_ the power, designed to tear rock apart, begin to work on his arms as well. He might have screamed as fissures began opening in his flesh, tracing whatever the organic equivalent of fault lines were as they crisscrossed his hands, wrists, arms-

When the flow finally ebbed, spent in its entirety, Bruno felt like someone had taken him and wrung his soul out like a rag over the sink. As the last of the power flowed out, Bruno found he could finally remove his hand from the stone - leaving twin dark hand prints on it, little trickles running from the bottom of each towards the cavern floor. He looked down at the ruined mess of his hands and forearms - _Damn_ , that was bone peeking out through the ones in his hands - and watched as the split flesh slowly began knitting back together starting where the seam had run over his elbow and up under the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. Said sleeves were now more than a little bloody, and Bruno sighed heavily. He didn’t want to think about cleaning the blood out of this shirt; he was weary down to his soul.

Turning, he caught Andi’s horrified gaze as she stared at the raw meat that still made up most of his lower arms. He grimaced at her in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion. “I’ll be all right, my dear. I’ve had worse.” She didn’t respond and he sighed again. Still deaf, probably. Bruno tipped his head up just in time to catch a gleam of light from the ceiling high above them.

A way out.


End file.
